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Tell me what your company does

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Re: Tell me what your company does

#181

Post by acomjean »

_0nac wrote: post #150
acomjean wrote: post #148

a coworker left my company to go work at pega-systems. They've been around for a while as a company but I visited their website to figure out what they do. Its a little better now, but... "Pegasystems Inc. is the leader in software for customer engagement and operational excellence. Pega’s adaptive, cloud-architected software – built on its unified Pega® Platform – empowers people to rapidly deploy, and easily extend…

So, um, what do they actually do? The only words in that that make any sense are CRM (customer relationship management) and CPM (business process management), and those are also hopelessly waffly business bingo buzzwords.

I'm still not entirely sure. I think they just make business software for businesses. Seems like something abstracted way too much..

I once did an in house mobile timekeeping app that interfaced with a big company accounting system that we could only talk to with xml directly. (Javascript on blackberry oddly...) It should have been so simple, but we had to do a lot of weird things because the accounting system was very obtuse. Reminds me of that.

Re: Tell me what your company does

#182

Post by softawre »

piinecone wrote: post #166
kaffeemitsahne wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The First A.I. Big Data Marketing Cloud for BlockChain" This is pure comedy.

I highly recommend a read through the "Learning Techniques" over at his other company's product page: https://gravity4.com/product/ You'll notice over there that you can "BELIMITLESS", if you like. At least today this is making my world a better place.

It's cheesy. But the guy does have success in startups

https://belimitless.com/gurbaksh-chahal/

Re: Tell me what your company does

#183

Post by dredmorbius »

This also applies to far too many non-companies as well. Free software projects are notorious for this.

For both I generally prefer Wikipedia to their own webssites.

My own similar rant, as an HN comment, remains among my more popular contributions here. "Please forward to marketing".

https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/27d5xr/please_...

Re: Tell me what your company does

#184

Post by csense »

mrhappyunhappy wrote: post #124
Xcelerate wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So... why is he wrong?

There are a number of reasons some websites do not list prices: 1. Pricing sets the wrong expectation for the true price you may actually pay once you get all the features you need and may not be aware of thus making the sale more difficult. 2. Pricing sets a transactional tone vs a mutually beneficial relationship 3. Pricing anchors your mind set to how much something costs vs how much value / ROI you get out of tha…

In other words, the provider's attempting to "look into your eyes," and determine how much value this is providing, thus how much you're able to pay, and base what they charge you off that.

It's called price discrimination. As Joel Spolsky says in his essay on the topic [1], "it pisses the heck off of people."

[1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/12/15/camels-and-rubber-...

Re: Tell me what your company does

#185

Post by orblivion »

jv22222 wrote: post #130
orblivion wrote: post #129

I can understand avoiding clickbait, but it seems that HN has a policy of making sure titles are sufficiently boring. Originally this post's title matched the blog post's title: > For the love of God, please tell me what your company does Adds some flair. Expresses the sentiment of the article. Now it simply says: > Tell me what your company does On the other hand, HN is an impressively effective, open minded atmosph…

I've been wondering the same thing. It does, sometimes, seem to come across a bit like the thought police...

I've seen people earnestly discuss climate skepticism here, which is a pretty taboo opinion to have these days, at least (let's say) in tech circles. So I don't think it's thought police. More like fun police.

Re: Tell me what your company does

#188

Post by chiefalchemist »

If I visit a site and they can't manage to tell me - clearly - what they do, I presume they don't know either. I quicky move on.

The whole "it's free to try" routine is tiring at best. It's your product...communicate to me why I should care. If you don't know why that might be, it's not my job to figure it out for you (or for me).

The problem is, such tactics (artificially) inflate the new users KPI. Retention? Actually using the product? Ha! Who cares!! No one ever asks about that.

Re: Tell me what your company does

#189

Post by moretai »

freech wrote: post #112
Retr0spectrum wrote: post #38

I came across this recently: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l644fAxGzlw Don't waste your time watching it. It's a promo video for yet another a very scammy looking ICO. I watched through the entire 3 minute video, only because I found it increasingly amusing how long they were taking to "get to the point". As it turns out, this video is 3 minutes of stock videos of Dubai with a pseudo-inspirational voiceover about n…

> I watched through the entire 3 minute video, only because I found it increasingly amusing how long they were taking to "get to the point". I think that's on purpose. They want you to invest time in it so that the sunk-cost-fallacy prevents you from admitting to yourself that it's a scam. It's the same reason that many courses start with a free video "but first, a little bit of history" or something.

Is this how guys like Ramit Sethi and other blogging self help guys get away with selling shoddy quality products? You basically read their free material and have invested insane amounts of time, that you might as well fork over $400 a month for slightly better material.

Re: Tell me what your company does

#190

Post by pillowkusis »

Some other reasons why B2B sites are incomprehensible, along with “get them on the phone at all costs”:

- What you do is totally opaque and requires a massive amount of context to explain. Yes, it’s 5 sentences, but only after both you and the user are in the same context trying to solve the same problem. Try to explain a randomly-selected B2B company’s model to your grandma. Impossible. Instead let’s focus on company branding and positive sounding platitudes.

- Once you’re selling to businesses, you’re selling to VPs and C-level executives. They don’t care about the problem you solve. You're solving some lower-level employee’s problem, or a systemic problem nobody experiences directly. Since the buyer (the VP) isn’t feeling any of the pain, the only way to justify the purchase is to focus exclusively on the high-level benefits of your service. They’re in charge of marketing. promise them perfect marketing. They’re in sales. Promise them better sales. Focus on the outcomes, not the “how”, at all costs.

- A lesser factor might be that companies love to align workers with an affirmation that the work these employees do 40+ hours a week is making the world better. B2B organizations have an especially hard time proving this because there’s no clear evidence their business does make the world better. No consumers who sing your praises or products that solve a problem the worker can empathize with. I suspect the large amount of mental gymnastics needed to justify “our company is a net good in the world” sometimes leaks into to marketing material which leads to weird-sounding empty affirmations that are more suited to internal employee “values” documents than actual marketing content. (“We make people’s lives easier”, for instance.)

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